HOW TO REPLACE OR FIT BASIN TAPS – LEVER TAPS – Plumbing Tips

This video will show you how to fit, replace or install new basin lever taps on your basin. This will also work for normal taps. We show you how to remove the old taps and with great close ups show you how to fit the new lever taps.

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Welcome to today’s echoey, yet again, plumberparts.co.uk video. Today is a very easy video. We’re going to show you quickly how to change over these two taps here, that have slightly become more and more difficult to turn off and they look a little bit old and tired. We can change them over for a nice new set of lever taps. So I hope you enjoy today’s video. I hope you subscribe, most importantly of all and I hope you also follow us on our Twitter and Facebook. For now, let’s get on with this job. I’m going to show you how it’s done. Hold tight!
So the first thing you’ll need to do is actually turn the water off to the taps, so we can actually do any work to them. What I often do is I’ll just turn each tap on slightly, so just a tiny little bit of water is coming out and then when it comes to turning them off in a minute, we’ll know that we’ve actually successfully turned off the right water supply. Luckily here, there’s two isolation valves underneath this sink, so what I’m going to need is a little slotted screwdriver to turn that off and that should make sure that that’s all done. Once you’ve got that done, we’re probably going to need to use this piece of equipment here. I call it the claw. You can also use a set of adjustable spanners or a pair of grips. Basically, what we need to do is slack them off the pipe that feeds to the bottom of the tap. Using one of these claws, you’ll find they go around both ways. They can either tighten up or loosen off. Also if you’ve got one like mine, you’ll find out that it’s also telescopic as well, so you can reach under there. Next, you can either use your tool, either the claw or the adjustable spanner, to undo the base of the bottom of the tap. And then, after that, you can either use your claw or your spanner again, or you can even use one of these, which is a tube spanner. It has two sizes. A large one for maybe bath taps or a smaller one for basic taps like the one we’re working on today. What you do, you use that to undo the plastic or brass part that actually hold the tap in place. As soon as you’ve undone that, you should be able to remove the old tap. So there you go.
I’ve got the old tap out of the way. I’ll do this other tap in a minute, but we’re just going to show you how to do this one tap for now because basically it’s exactly the same for each tap. The next thing we do here is prepare our new tap to go in. The first thing is, I usually just give the old seating area, where the old tap was sitting, a nice little rub around. Just get that cleaned off. Hopefully, I’ve made this new one look a little bit better. Then we just remove the nut off the new one, a new plastic nut. As you can see, I’ve got an assorted rubber washer here. That will stay on this side. We’re just going to pop that on there. Then I’m just going to go and hold the tap roughly in place where I want it, get my hand underneath, and just start turning it just like that. You might need help doing this, it depends if you can see underneath the sink very well. Obviously, I’ve done this about a million, squ-illion times, so I’m good at it. Then I’m going to go back under there with my tap spanner. The great thing about having the right tools, I can hole this in place and tighten this down exactly where I want it. Now all I need to do is reattach the cold water feed pipe. Sometimes you’ll find that it’s a really really old bit of pipe. You might even need to replace the actual bit that connects to the bottom of the tap or remove the old fibre washer and put a nice little rubber o-ring washer on there. Or if you’re willing to risk it, you can use a little bit of PTFE tape to try and seal it. We’ve all been there when we can’t be bothered to go back down to the van. I’m just going to change over the other tap now and then hopefully everything should be absolutely brilliant. I’ll turn the water on, check for leaks, and then give it a bit of a clean up. Once again, they’re both done. I just going to turn this water back on now. There we go, that’s that one. That’s the hot water. We should be able to switch that on. Let the air out. There we go. All done! There we go. We’ve gone from the old manky taps to the nice, new quarter turn lever taps. How beautiful they look. I’ll think you’ll agree how easy it was to do this well.